


i just can't think of england

by postcardmystery



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Self-Harm, Suicide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-15
Updated: 2012-10-15
Packaged: 2017-11-16 09:20:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/537905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“A life half-lived,” he’d said, Lestrade’s leather jacket wet in the soft, grey rain, “Is not a life at all.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	i just can't think of england

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for drug addiction, mental illness, self-harm, and suicide.

London was so full of life he could practically hear it breathing. He used to take walks for hours, smoke cigarettes with shaking hands in front of crackhouses in Camden, climb the lions at Trafalgar Square, watch the sun rise above the South Bank, pull his ratty coat tighter, smoke and breathe out and out and out. His heart beat too fast and his heart beat too slow and it never quite seemed to end. Daddy put him in rehab, put him in a mental health ward, put him in prison. The skyline stayed grey and his hands still shook. He light fag after fag, lighter bummed from a patient, an inmate, a guard, and breathed in air sour with sweat and fear and the impermeable London smell that clung, always, to his hair and his clothes and his twitching, bruised, desperate hands.  
  
It never seemed to end; until it did.  
  
  
  
  
  
“Tell me your name,” she’d said, so he did. That was not his first mistake, but he bought his first needle years ago, and the time for regret was long gone, or so he thought. (That was not his second mistake, but, like Her, one of many.)  
  
  
  
  
  
He was in rehab again. The crooks of his elbows were rubbed red raw, and his hair was coming out in tufts. Every morning, in the shower, he’d pull it out and watch it swirl around the plughole. He’d smear it on the walls, make patterns, try to pass the time one paltry, endless second at a time. He had too much time. Too little. It was becoming difficult to tell.  
  
She’d got past Daddy’s orders, God knows how. She ran a hand through her short hair, tapped a tattooed finger on the sheer plastic table, said, Jersey-shot and deep and dark and dangerous, “You’re a fuckin’ moron, as usual, babe.”  
  
“So it seems,” he’d said, not letting his chest clutch in answer at her words, and when she tilted her head, considering, deadly, he’d grinned at her, little more than a baring of teeth, stretched wide so she could see his bleeding gums and how his lip ripped at the side when he moved just right, and it was then, and only then, she smiled in return.  
  
  
  
  
  
They let him out and they let him out and it never seemed to begin. He ‘assisted the Met with their enquiries’ and went home, shot smack, tried not to let it show in front of Lestrade in the morning. (Nobody’s that good an actor, not even him.) He was too pale and too thin and surely this had to start, stop,  _the whole world’s a stage_ , he knew, he knew, but why was the only actor on it him? He kept his works clean and his nose bloody and Lestrade always bought him a nice meal before he let him slip off into the night.  
  
“You’re a mess, son,” he’d said, and Holmes had shrugged, wiped his nose, not looking at where it came away red, said, “Aren’t we all, Inspector, aren’t we all.”  
  
  
  
  
  
“I don’t love you,” he told her, again and again and again, and was met every time with a smirk, a tilt of the head, a knowing laugh, but he still kept saying it, and he didn’t quite know why.  
  
  
  
  
  
It was a mistake,  _a slip of the wrist_ , he told his brother, when he came, and brother meant Daddy and Daddy meant restraints and not this old wank again, but his wrist didn’t slip but it was slit all the same, and life was a kitchen table with the cuts scored deep, a turntable and the music wouldn’t stop and his hands kept on moving, a round table and he didn’’t get a seat, and he was talking and talking and his fingers dug into his brother’s wrist, left long red lines that matched, and his brother smirked, an echo genetic and bitter and pure, said, “Only yours will scar.”  
  
  
  
  
  
“Do they hurt?” his brother had said, pulling at a pink collar, the scratches at his wrist still pink and hot.  
  
“What do you think,” he’d said, pulling down the sleeves of his jumper, watched his brother feed the ducks in Hyde Park, wrapped his arms around his knees and put his head on his brother’s shoulder, didn’t speak and didn’t speak and his brother, he just knew, the way he always did.  
  
  
  
  
  
“A life half-lived,” he’d said, Lestrade’s leather jacket wet in the soft, grey rain, “Is not a life at all.”  
  
“All right, mate,” said Lestrade, shoving him in the back of his plain-clothes car, “Is there some sort of rule that says live or die trying?”  
  
“Every rule in the world says that,” said Holmes, and when Lestrade glanced back, he couldn’t even meet his own eyes in the mirror.  
  
  
  
  
  
At Christmas, he’d been too thin. It was 2011, but it could have been any year for the past ten years. His shoes were cheap and his eyes were red and he called his brother, met him fresh from a tattoo parlour, red soaking through his thin t-shirt and sniffing, coughing, rubbing at his nose.  
  
“You need to clean that,” his brother had said, and he’d snorted, knocked his hands off, said, “What does a spy know about tattoos? I was under the impression all identifiable marks were forbidden.”  
  
His brother pulled up his sleeve, showed the train-track black lines over where, once, blood of his blood had scored his fingernails as a last, frantic request, said, “You can’t wash some things off, Lucky.”  
  
“What do you know,” he’d hissed, the way he always, always had, and his brother started the car, let his wrist stay bare, said, “That’s the question, isn’t it?”  
  
  
  
  
  
He’d been clean. That was what he said, to Lestrade and his brother and a dozen A&E nurses. Lestrade wanted to believe him, said he was lonely, said he’d buy him a pint and a packet of crisps and let him kip on his sofa for a while. (His wife wouldn’t mind, thought Holmes was in need of a bit of mothering, you see.) His brother laughed, down the phone line, over cards, every Sunday, during supper at his house in Chelsea, voice thick with the Holmes charm that came out so well in his dulcet tones and so wrong in his little brother’s, so it always, always seemed. The nurses raised eyebrow after eyebrow that said they’d seen it all before, that his lips might lie but the red at his elbows and knees told the truth for him. They pumped him full of liquids, fed him dull hospital food, mended his broken bones and stitched his cuts and tried to send him to meeting after meeting.  
  
He’d been clean. You can repeat the lie as often as you like, but you can’t ever make it true until you actually  _try_.  
  
  
  
  
  
“I don’t miss you,” he’d said, and she never, ever believed him.  
  
“I don’t miss you, either,” she’d said, and he believed her every time.  
  
  
  
  
  
So it didn’t end. He rode buses, high and his skin itching, the city screaming past him in a sickening neon blur. He took the drugs and they pushed him up and pushed him down but never quite seemed to even him out. His mind raged and raced and did not do a single thing he asked of it, so he got high, got high, waited for a balance that was never going to come. He knew every street in London, twisted by heroin, jacked-up on cocaine, and he walked and he dug his fingernails into his thighs, his wrists, and he felt everything, nothing, and he couldn’t reel it, that elusive it, back in.  
  
  
  
  
  
A nightmare in a kitchen setting; fit for Pinter; fit for Eastenders, him, slumped, head lolling back on the table leg; phone already dialled in her hand, a needle in his hand.  
  
“So, I take it that you don’t love me?” he’d said, and he wished he’d had the strength not to, but he was beginning to learn that wishing that you wouldn’t do something didn’t count for much.  
  
She looked at him, gaze steady, face kind, and then said, edged with pity and concern and more than a little sadness, “I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone.”  
  
“Me neither,” he said, and he knew he was being unfair, knew he had no right to ask and she had no obligation to answer, but he’d started something he couldn’t finish, couldn’t begin, couldn’t ever ever stop, so he bit down on the plastic, pushed the plunger in.  
  
  
  
  
  
Sometimes, it takes a little bit more than a mere  _second_  chance. He opened his eyes in London, in London, and then--  
  
  
  
  
  
“Welcome to New York,” said the man at the desk, and Holmes closed his eyes, felt his father’s hand on his shoulder and the bruising in the creases of his elbows and the electric rush of  _city_  beneath his feet, and felt something that, if it was not regret, could certainly have borrowed its overcoat.  
  
“Last chance,” said Daddy, Eton-rich and firm, and he pulled his jacket tighter, breathed in, and, even though he wanted to look away, for the first time in a very long time, he didn’t.


End file.
